LATE-NIGHT POOL

Friday, July 30, 2004

13:51 Note

A note Gabriëlle and I saw this morning, pinned to a tree, at the end of the dead end Amsterdam street where our studio is located. The tree is at a corner favoured by junkies and the homeless, though they don't make use of it that often, really - which is surprising since it is a delightful, quiet corner just off Centraal Station.
The note is handwritten (in a mix or English and Dutch) over a L'oréal commercial ripped off a magazine. It consists of ramblings about the affection the author feels for that spot and shows the horror vacui state of mind he/she seemed to be in.
For a higher resolution that's pretty readable go here.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004

19:25

Great news! Airplant was asked by the Dutch post to design a stamp (to be issued next year). We had our briefing meeting today and we're now very happy indeed.
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Thursday, July 22, 2004

09:19 Think and build
Peik joined me last night at the new apartment to check what's really behind the two huge shafts, one where the kitchen is planned to be installed, the other at the bathroom. We drilled two round holes into each shaft and peeked through one while sticking a flashlight into the other. There's a lot of unused space in there, and that's good news.

We then came to the Airplant studio and puzzled for a few hours till we found a really good layout for both bathroom and kitchen. Better even, according to the rules of the ministery of VROM, this plan does not require a building permit, just a clear agreement with the neighbours, who I plan to contact still this week.

Great news, then a great night of sleep.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004

00:34 Boing, crash
After almost three years, last Sunday I had the pleasure of retiring my futon. I now once again sleep on a real mattress. My back is happy and keeps asking me, out loud: Man oh man! what were you thinking?

I still love the tatami mats though, and my hammock; they have their place guaranteed in the new apartment.

One thing that I now know, will take getting used to, is the bouncing of objects: often I'd throw stuff onto my bed from other parts of the room, especially a few minutes before going to sleep. Stuff I want to have next to me: my phone, books, remote controls, my palm. That worked fine because nothing bounced on the futon. Things would fall and stay where they fell.
Just now I threw the cordless phone onto the mattress from a few meters away and it bounced right out of bed, hitting something, not sure what, with a loud crash. I wonder if one bouncing will be enough to erase my object-throwing habit. Bed time now.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

21:59 TV; no words
I'm once again speechless at the quality of the BBC programming.
(voice in the head says, next day: well, if you're so speechless how come you're writing about it?)

While cooking my dinner I turned on BBC2 to find an ongoing episode of a series called Inventions that changed the world - tonight: The Jet. After a primer on the invention of the jet engine in the 1930's by struggling British pilot Frank Whitle (and how the British later traded its design for American support during WWII) presenter Jeremy Clarkson goes on a 4-day flight around the world: London ? New York ? LA ? Tahiti ? Auckland ? Sydney ? London. While he travels you get introduced to great archive material about the only few decades of jet travel and how it changed everyone's lives: from the early square windows (a design mistake that brought down may of the early Comet planes), to footage of the destruction of B-52s at the end of the cold war (and how the remaining ones will remain in use till 2041), to weather changes registered just after Sept11, when no air traffic was allowed over the US, to SARS, the global distribution of food, and Jeremy Clarks's owns difficulties with the physical strains of flying.

Just before the end I decide to e-mail Dewald about the show, since he has a thing for airplanes and flies more than any other person I know. Some thirty seconds after I send his message I see I have incoming mail from him, certainly sent just as I sent mine, and starting with

How are you (...) Currently flying over Nuuk so have plenty of time in the plane to catch up with long overdue email responses.

Nuuk?

The next programme is called Restoration, and is a sort of call-in show where viewers vote between three severely decayed historical buildings (this week in Wales). To inform you on your decision you get to join a duo of experts on an architectonic inspection of the ruined palace, art-deco cinema, correction home, castle, or whataver it once was, with plenty of exciting archive footage of each building in its former glory, background info about its construction and the possible reasons for the current state of decay.

Each building has a spokesperson from the local community who presents the renovation plans (computer-generated animations show the transformation from old to new) and this person also justifies the many millions of pounds needed for the task; each building has a support group working hard to get votes and donations; the local press adds spice to the competition. The winning building gets the money, gets revamped, gets famous again and is returned to the community. The second favourite will join the second favourites of former weeks on a final round where one more building will be chosen and its renovation financed.

To be able to like this programme you only need to like houses, or history, or competitions, or money. It brings people together in all sorts of ways. It's television at its best.
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Thursday, July 15, 2004

18:00 Prins Hendrikkade, perpetual byebye
Caterina left this morning after a month of Amsterdam. Her plane must be approaching Vancouver in a short while. I missed giving her a goodbye kiss and found a sweet note on my doormat this morning - the last of several doormat surprises, a mini-ritual of the past month.

My Amsterdam life of the past nine-and-a-half years has been made of people coming and going, and even though I like to think that this has turned me into a pretty savvy bye-byer I still notice a sort of background tension, a barely noticeable but definitely undermining form of ingrown sadness around both the arrivals and departures of the ones I love.

caterina's note (fragment); Dos pesos face means a sad face you make when think of you someone you miss very, very much.

caterina's note (fragment); Dos pesos face means a sad face you make when think of you someone you miss very, very much.

Caterina stayed two floors above me, in our former apartment, now Fred's. Two nights ago she gathered her Amsterdam friends (and their friends) for a farewell dinner party with amazing food and excellent conversation. That very same day I had posted two letters to Mr. Van Gaalen, the landlord, informing him of the termination of the two leases. And that's why for me the party had a very surreal tone, especially at the end when everybody was saying goodbye. Inside of me there was a sort of multi-layered goodbye going on and on: goodbye to Caterina, the last of many many guests and the perfect neighbour, goodbye to the great years of living in that building, some sad, some exciting; goodbye to all the goodbyes that took place at that door, to the tiny hall between the apartment door and the steps, to the crooked staircase with all its uneven steps, goodbye to Roy and Elaine, to the owl, to the heaviest front door of the whole world.
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Monday, July 12, 2004

02:21 it's not porn, it's me.

Thanks to my ongoing interest in social nudity, the value of privacy and some specific issues around identity, I was invited to give a lecture last Tuesday at the TEEK independent film festival in Breda.
The talk started with the story of my recent experiment in making public my nude self-portrait and the reactions that this has caused, and went on to discussing some of the questions I have been asking myself lately:

Why are some aspects of our private lives supposed to be carefully guarded, protected?
What makes them so valuable?
What happens when you generously give away that what is supposed to be precious?
What are the relationships connecting property, attachment, identity?
What are the forces behind the social conventions involving the body and nudity?
How can we turn a mechanism of repression into a mechanism of liberation?

In preparing the talk I started seeing some really interesting connections between these issues, some of them for the first time, and that made me realize once again the relevance all this stuff has for me. During the lecture I also showed some work by Dunne & Raby, Lygia Clark, Arnoud Holleman, Jim van der Woude and Spencer Tunnick, and the discussion that followed was very open; the public seemed stimulated and receptive. Knowing that not everybody is interested in these topics I had counted on the possibility of cynical or smart-ass remarks but there was none of that.
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Saturday, July 10, 2004

23:57 Ginger and mint
Just back from an unexpected outdoors barbeque with Madelinde&Peik + Annelys&Rudy. I offered to bring something for dessert, and chose for a melon and a watermelon, to be tentatively combined with fresh mint and ginger preserve. The consistencies were a bit odd in that nothing would stick together, but the mix of tastes worked really well. Something to try again at home, maybe as a sort of paste or sauce.
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16:57 Dishus
It is Saturday afternoon and I'm home doing the week's dishes which, as you and I know, is clearly a case of simultaneous good and bad news. I'm close to the end, doing the utensils, and having washed the cheese slicer I recalled something curious that Aldje said a few weeks ago during lunch: that Dutch people can be recongnized by the presence of cheese slicer scars around their fingernails. Some two other Dutch people were present but they had never heard of such a thing, though everyone felt sorf of fascinated by the idea.

The Dutch word for cheese slicer is Kaasschaaf, which literally translates as Cheese Shave or maybe Cheese Shaver.

I now vaguely seem to remember that there's also a political connotation to the word but I'm not totally sure what it is; something about the cutting of the government expenses or a global dimishing of budgets I think.
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Monday, July 05, 2004

18:15 Euphorbia tirucalli

After waiting for quite a while I bought today this pencil cactus (it's not really a cactus). For now it is a temporary guest at the studio, but its permanent address will be my new terrace. Yaaay!

It replaces a very humble little euphorbia stick I tried to plant and grow earlier this year but that eventually died. This time I made sure to get one that was a little more grown up, which I hope will turn into a real tree-like thing.
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Friday, July 02, 2004

14:23 Sold to the gentleman with the beer belly.
Today is celebration day: after quite some months of effort and with a lot of support and just enough patience from those around me, I finally have signed the papers of my new mini apartment. Yaaay! The keys will be mine on Sept 1st, and then some basic renovation will be necessary (fun!)... By early October I hope to be fully istalled.
I found the whole buying process much more interesting than expected, and I hope I get around to writing a bit about it.
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